1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to the scoring of local search results based on location prominence.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user as links.
Local search engines are search engines that attempt to return business listings and/or relevant web pages within a specific geographical area. For a local search, a user may enter a search query and specify a geographical area near which the search query is to be performed. The local search engine returns relevant results, such as listings of businesses in the geographical area and/or relevant web pages pertaining to the geographical area, to the user.
When scoring the results, a local search engine may identify a location within the geographical area. This identified location may be associated with the location of city hall, downtown, or a geographic center of the area. The local search engine identifies all business listings and/or web pages within a predetermined radius of the identified location. The local search engine may then identify those business listings and/or web pages that match the search query. The identified business listings and/or web pages are assigned scores according to their distance from the identified location and ranked based on their scores. If the user does not live near the identified location or is not interested in business listings and/or web pages near the identified location, the search results are not meaningful to the user.
Other local search engines may rank business listings and/or web pages alphabetically or alphabetically by town. Oftentimes, this type of ranking is not meaningful to the user.